Final day in Baton Rouge and a visit to LSU

Downtown Baton Rouge from the top of the State Capitol

After touring the Louisiana State Capitol building we set out to see the old one which was located nearby in downtown Baton Rouge. This structure, known as "the old gray castle", served as the seat of government from 1852 until 1932 and is considered one of the most distinguished examples of Gothic architecture in the United States.

Original Louisiana State House (1852 - 1932)

The building was not without its critics as Mark Twain, the riverboat captain, wrote about seeing it from the wheel house of his steamboat while passing by on the Mississippi River, "It is pathetic that a whitewashed castle, with turrets and things should ever have been built in this otherwise honorable place." I think if Twain had lived to see the towering colossus that took its place the old building would seem quaintly austere and restrained by comparison.

Stained glass dome of the Old Capitol


Spiral staircase in the center---very Gothic indeed!

Our next stop was the campus of Louisiana State University, known to everyone in the South as LSU. This gigantic school is a member of a fervently ritualistic religious cult, that I am a branch member of, known as the Southeastern Football Conference (SEC). Throughout the Deep South each Saturday in the fall gaudy and determined gladiatorial battles are staged in vast arenas where the honor and pride of whole regions is determined in hard fought combat on the gridiron. LSU is one of the founding members of this league and its fans are some of the most dedicated and fanatical in all of sports.

The most outward manifestation of this fanaticism is the large enclosure, built next to the stadium, that houses their team mascot Mike the Tiger. This hallowed compound is a landscaped replica of native tiger habitat with a stream of running water, rocky outcrops and miniature jungle. This particular Mike was the fifth to be the official mascot in a line of tigers stretching back to 1936. It seemed to be one of the most visited places in Baton Rouge and a spot of much reverence and curiosity from visiting pilgrims.

Mike V sleeps the afternoon away.


Outside Mike's compound


Be part of a legacy!

Another interesting sight on the campus are two ancient mounds located across from the Huey P. Long Field House. According to the official campus guide book, "Archaeologists believe the Indian mounds were built more than 5,000 years ago, before the construction of the Egyptian pyramids. Scientists also believe Native Americans constructed the mounds for ceremonial or religious purposes, not for shelter or burial sites. The exact purposes remain a mystery as researchers do not want to risk damaging the mounds with further testing or digging."

LSU Indian Mounds

There are also five lakes on campus that teem with all kinds of wild critters including: ducks, geese, egrets, turtles, fish and white pelicans. It's Louisiana ain't it?

A large turtle heads back into an LSU lake after a stroll near the dorms.

On a sad note Mike V died this past Friday from old age. He had served as the official LSU mascot since 1990. The search is on for Mike VI. http://snipurl.com/1labt

Ron Paul Got It Right!

I hate your freedom!

Many of you, for logical reasons, probably did not see the recent Republican presidential debate on Fox. The highlight came when Ron Paul suggested that the United States government had a role in precipitating the attacks of 9/11 by meddling in the affairs of the Middle East. This observation stirred an angry rebuke from Rudy the Great who asked him to take it back. It was probably the high point of the entire presidential campaign.

Thankfully today a nationally syndicated columnist has seen fit to comment on the veracity of Paul's claim. I am proud to offer the link to this column for your perusal:

http://www.lewrockwell.com/buchanan/buchanan58.html

By the way, Ron Paul won the debate according to the informal Fox News poll conducted afterwards, much to the consternation and angry confusion of that modern day political genius Sean Hannity. Way to go Dr. Ron!!!! Long live freedom and the truth! Those things still matter to some of us.

Huey's Monument in Baton Rouge

Huey P. Long (1893 - 1935)

I first became aware of the life and legend of Huey P. Long as a teenager through the record album Good Old Boys (1974) by Randy Newman. This record was a collection of songs that attempted to sum up the mid-century South through the eyes of a half-native son who had grown up in Los Angeles and spent much time in Louisiana visiting his mother's family. Good Old Boys opened a door of understanding for me about a region I both loved and longed to know better.

Popularly known as the Kingfish, Huey P. Long was a despotic populist politician whose sudden rise to power in the late 1920's and early 30's spookily paralleled the ascent of similar leaders in Europe like Hitler, Stalin, Franco, Tito and Mussolini. He was by no means the only American pseudo-dictator as there were tin-pot fascists all across the fruited plain in those days in places like Mississippi, Georgia, Florida, Boston, Memphis, Kansas City and the ultra corrupt city halls of New York, Chicago and San Francisco. Long was elected governor in 1928 and then became a U.S. Senator in 1932, serving until his assassination in 1935. He died at the age of 42.

Randy Newman opens his song about Long, titled The Kingfish, with these immortal lines:

There's a hundred thousand Frenchmen in New Orleans
In New Orleans there are Frenchmen everywhere
But your house could fall down
Your baby could drown
Wouldn't none of those Frenchmen care

Everybody gather 'round
Loosen up your suspenders
Hunker down on the ground
I'm a cracker
And you are too
But don't I take good care of you

Who built the highway to Baton Rouge?
Who put up the hospital and built you schools?
Who looks after shit-kickers like you?
The Kingfish do

It was an incredible thing to visit Baton Rouge today, some 72 years after his death, and discover his shadow still looming large over the landscape of his native state. His name is plasterd on practically everything from streets and bridges to schools and public buildings.

Our first stop on Saturday was the beautiful and over-the-top state capitol building located on a bluff above the Mississippi River. The funding for this totally un-needed skyscraper was bulled through the legislature by Governor Long in 1929 and it was completed in 1932. At 34-stories it is the tallest building in Louisiana. It was built as a monument to the power and strivings Long envisioned for himself as a spokesperson and guardian angel of the "common man", who had struggled mightily to overcome the wealth and privelege of corporations, bankers, lawyers and most of all those rotten French Catholics down in New Orleans.

Louisiana State Capitol Building

Louisiana, like Ireland, is divided into a Protestant north and Catholic south which has historically been the more dominant section of the state. Huey Long, from Winnfield in the north, was able to turn this long simmering animosity towards the cake eating aristocrats of New Orleans and the Acadian parishes into a holy crusade which ultimately led him to gain un-checked political power. Two books that deal with this subject quite well are All The Kings Men by Robert Penn Warren and Louisiana Hayride by Harnett Kane.

Long's legacy has certainly been a mixed bag for Louisiana, with his heavy handed dictatorial tactics and political corruption bringing confusion and shame in its wake, but the people of this mostly poor and rural state seem to have accepted that he also brought modernizing changes to their way of life even if it was through ruthless intimidation. It reminded me of when I was a child and people would say about Hitler and Mussolini "well at least they got the trains to run on time". As if to say that at least one positive thing had come from their rule. There are people alive in Russia today who will declaim "that at least under Stalin no one went hungry"; an accolade directed towards the architect of some of history's most brutal famines. Dictators almost always leave a confusing legacy to those they have unjustly ruled over.

Statue atop Huey P. Long's grave

The really strange thing about this building is that Long was also assassinated in it, under circumstances that are still debated today, and was then buried on the front lawn under a large statue of himself that faces the front entrance. It was a monument that eventually became his tomb.

The Louisiana state capitol building is a towering reminder of man and his often twisted and sadistic notions of power. As a piece of architecture it is a stupendous work of streamline moderne Art Deco, as an actual place it still spins a cautionary tale of unchecked power and greed that resonates as loudly today as it did nearly a century ago.

A painting of the assassination at the spot where it occurred.



Next up: the mysteries of LSU! Same bat channel folks!

Louisiana sojourn

We spent last Friday and Saturday in the northeastern parishes of Louisiana mucking around in swamps, visiting the enormous campus of LSU and taking a tour of the imposing Art Deco edifice that is the State Capitol building sitting atop a bluff on the Mississippi River. I have decided to break the trip up into separate pieces and will begin with our adventures in Livingston Parish and the sublime swamps and bayous of Tickfaw State Park.

We arrived in the middle of a very heavy rain storm, in fact it set the all time record for East Baton Rouge Parish (8 inches in 24 hours), which mercifully ended soon after our arrival. The weather forecasters in Louisiana were saying that it probably had ended their drought in one fell swoop. This massive system, for some strange reason, never made it to Florida and boy could we have used it!

The first stop was Tickfaw State Park in Livingston Parish. This wonderful preserve is set in the wild verdant swamps and bottom land forests along Gum Bayou and the Tickfaw River. Most of the trails are along elevated walkways that probe deeply into the densely green foliage amidst the eerie whooping and wild shrieks of birds, frogs and insects. It was as close to a tropical jungle as I've ever encountered and due to the fact that we arrived just minutes after a record breaking deluge we had the entire park to ourselves.

Gum/Cypress Swamp Trail


Blue dasher


Deep in the bayou


Green darner


Caterpillar and aphid munching on a leaf


Going down to the crossroads
Springfield, Louisiana

Next stop: Baton Rouge. Stay tuned folks.

Wildfires Continue

After all of the wildfire activity on Monday it was pretty scary to have even more on Tuesday that was much closer to where we live. I was driving home from grocery shopping when I noticed a large cloud of smoke rising from the general area of our residence in Seagrove Beach. I called home to find out where it was and told that it was located down the road a ways and not in our immediate vicinity. It was about 2.5 miles west of our home.

Smoke from the Seagrove Beach fire.

Luckily for our community a lot of firefighting equipment and personnel were nearby mopping up the Panama City Beach fire, from the day before, and were able to respond quickly. Three houses were destroyed and two others were heavily damaged. The fire was put down in about two hours and thank God for that because there are a lot of homes and people in the area where it broke out.

Also in the area was one of the P-3 Orion air tanker planes that I had come to know and recognize (#22) from living in Cedar Valley where it had been active in fighting Nevada & Utah wildfires last year out of the Cedar City Airport. As my former neighbor Larry quipped to me yesterday on the phone, "you probably weren't expecting to see that albatross flying overhead down in Florida". No Larry, I really wasn't.

Coming in for an air drop.


A familiar sight overhead.

Meanwhile the fire in Panama City Beach, which was being monitored and mopped up, flared again because resources had been diverted to the Seagrove Beach blaze. It was an eerie and unsettling sight to see the fire trucks and rescue squad vehicles suddenly turn around and begin racing back to the scene of the fire that they had left unattended for a few hours, only to see it rise menacingly again on the horizon. Let's all pray for rain.

The Panama City Beach fire flares up again on Tuesday afternoon.

Still smoldering woods from the Panama City Beach fire.


Burned fence and melted siding


A very close call.

Wildfires in the Panhandle

There are currently two wildfires raging in this area of the Florida Panhandle, one in Walton County just north of Choctawhatchee Bay and the other in Bay County just a few miles east of here. It is believed that embers blown south from the Walton County fire ignited the second blaze near the coast.

All of Florida is experiencing severe to moderate drought. Our particular region has a large entrenched dome of high pressure sitting over us that, along with extremely low relative humidity, has created a favorable environment for wildfires. A steady and dry northerly wind has been fanning the flames and as of this writing the Bay County fire is burning on both sides of U.S. Hwy. 98 and into residential sections of the small resort community of Panama City Beach (where seven homes have burned as of this writing).

I just happened to be heading home from a trip to Shell Island today when my vehicle was diverted off Hwy. 98 due to smoke and flames along the roadway. I did have my camera along and took some pictures to share which y'all.

It sure did remind me a lot of where I had just moved from.

Approaching the fire from the east on U.S. 98


Where we were forced to detour off the highway.


A western vantage from a second-floor deck in Panama City Beach.

Back roads to Winter Haven

Last week I drove down to central Florida to attend a three-day training course. I had the leisure to take my time and avoid the interstates, so I drove mostly on lonely back roads through much lesser known and far less glamorous sections of the Sunshine State.

Here are some snapshots of this road trip taken with my ancient, but trusty, Canon A-1 film camera.

Happy May from Dixie!

Confederate floral wreath
Taylor County, FL


Perry, FL


Lakeland, FL


The crew of Mr. Fish


Stately oak and bungalow
Lakeland, FL


After church at the Victory Tabernacle
Lake Alfred, FL


Gator Motel
Kissimmee, FL


Williston, FL


A back road leading home
Leon County, FL

The Blacksburg Shooter

Many issues have been raised by the recent horror at Virginia Tech, not the least of which is the glaring failure of gun control and the inability of our so-called government protectors to actually protect us while simultaneously denying us the means with which to defend ourselves.

The following passage from Pat Buchanan's most recent column struck a chord and reminded me of the times in my life when I stood up and took a stand against bad behavior and was told I needed to be more tolerant. As was pointed out by my friend Audie, in a recent series of emails shared by a group of former Zion rangers who keep in touch with one another, we were lucky that this type of thing never happened in our old dormitory because many of the freaks and misanthropes that we shared living quarters with had all of the tendencies and mannerisms shown by the Virginia Tech shooter.

If there is a lesson to be taken away from this horror, it is that we, as a society, are becoming too tolerant of the aberrant. For, in retrospect, the signs Cho was a disturbed and dangerous young man, who belonged not on a campus but in an institution, are many.

He stalked one girl until she complained to police. He e-mailed another until she, too, went to police. Cho was taken to a psychiatrist, who concluded he was a "danger to himself and to others." He wrote plays for a creative writing class so full of hate and violence they alarmed one teacher to the point where she pressed him to get counseling. Another teacher had demanded and gotten his removal from her class.

Suite-mates in Harper Hall found him so uncommunicative they thought he could not speak English. All those who lived with him seemed to know about him is that he never spoke, turned away when spoken to, watched TV, worked his word processor incessantly and went to the gym.

Though he spent four years on campus, no one knew who Cho was, which bespeaks a larger point. Colleges have grown into city-sized universities of tens of thousands, and have ceased to be communities, even as the United States is ceasing to be a country, a nation and a people.

We are told that is a good thing. We are ever admonished to respect differences, to be tolerant of what we might think of as bizarre behavior. We are told that among the worst of sins is to be judgmental about how others behave.

Multiculaturalism is what we are about. Diversity is our strength. All cultures, all people, all lifestyles are to be treated equally. At Blacksburg on Monday, we learned that there is such a thing as too much tolerance.

I Like Florida

Williford Spring

Well it's been a little over six months now and the verdict is in-----I like Florida! In fact I've become a bit of a homebody by not wanting to travel anywhere else but right here in the Sunshine State. It feels like home in ways that Utah never did.

For me it is the perfect blend of many of the things I love best: wild and rampant nature, the Deep South, a place with a long and colorful history, great thrift stores, Southeastern Conference football, sunny weather, laid back friendly people and a Wal-Mart wherever you need one.

Philosophically it is more in line with my libertarian views with its liberal gun laws, lower taxes (NO INCOME TAX!) and an easy going live and let live attitude that I found to be somewhat lacking in the Beehive State.

All in all I feel that I have found a happy home here in the land of alligators, sunshine and saw grass. If you haven't yet checked out my Florida blog site here's the link: http://www.naturalflorida.blogspot.com/

I hope y'all are as satisfied with your neck of the woods as I am with mine. Come Sunday I'll have been married five whole months!! That's been pretty fun too.

Tonight's sunset behind my house

Stinky's

While driving through the small beach community of Dune Allen, Florida we noticed this sign for a seafood restaurant. Now my question to you gentle readers is this: would any of y'all stop to eat at a place so named? I look forward to your answers and will forward the results of this survey to the owners after recieving a sufficent response. I thank you in advance.

Is there any type of business where the name Stinky's would be an asset?

Hot gases emanating

A few headlines from today show that the once unquestionable orthodoxy of global warming appears to be fraying at the edges and is not the sure fire (pardon the pun) path to doom it has been sold to be by politicians eager to gain power through fear.

We start with the fact that NYC is experiencing the coldest April, so far, in 113 years:

http://snipurl.com/1g27r

Then we have the following passage from, of all people on MY blog, Camille Paglia in the most current issue of Salon:

As a native of upstate New York, whose dramatic landscape was carved by the receding North American glacier 10,000 years ago, I have been contemplating the principle of climate change since I was a child. Niagara Falls, as well as the even bigger dry escarpment of Clark Reservation near Syracuse, is a memento left by the glacier. So is nearby Green Lakes State Park, with its mysteriously deep glacial pools. When I was 10, I lived with my family at the foot of a drumlin -- a long, undulating hill of murrain formed by eddies of the ancient glacier melt.

Geology and meteorology are fields that have always interested me and that I might well have entered, had I not been more attracted to art and culture. (My geology professor in college, in fact, asked me to consider geology as a career.) To conflate vast time frames with volatile daily change is a sublime exercise, bordering on the metaphysical.

However, I am a skeptic about what is currently called global warming. I have been highly suspicious for years about the political agenda that has slowly accrued around this issue. As a lapsed Catholic, I detest dogma in any area. Too many of my fellow Democrats seem peculiarly credulous at the moment, as if, having ground down organized religion into nonjudgmental, feel-good therapy, they are hungry for visions of apocalypse. From my perspective, virtually all of the major claims about global warming and its causes still remain to be proved.

Climate change, keyed to solar cycles, is built into Earth's system. Cooling and warming will go on forever. Slowly rising sea levels will at some point doubtless flood lower Manhattan and seaside houses everywhere from Cape Cod to Florida -- as happened to Native American encampments on those very shores. Human habitation is always fragile and provisional. People will migrate for the hills, as they have always done.

Who is impious enough to believe that Earth's contours are permanent? Our eyes are simply too slow to see the shift of tectonic plates that has raised the Himalayas and is dangling Los Angeles over an unstable fault. I began "Sexual Personae" (parodying the New Testament): "In the beginning was nature." And nature will survive us all. Man is too weak to permanently affect nature, which includes infinitely more than this tiny globe.

Next in line are some of my favorite targets, limosine liberals, in this case rock stars crusading against global warming in the current Live Earth concerts (from the Daily Mail of London):

.....But green campaigners called the stars' involvement hypocritical last night saying their lifestyles which demand they jet themselves and their huge entourages on world tours give them enormously large carbon footprints.

Last year, for example, they report how Madonna flew as many as 100 technicians, dancers, backing singers, managers and family members on a 56-date world tour in private jets and commercial airliners.

Madonna herself also has a collection of fuel-guzzling cars, including a Mercedes Maybach, two Range Rovers, Audi A8s and a Mini Cooper S. Yet she will headline the London concert to "combat the climate crisis".

Madonna's Confessions tour produced 440 tonnes of CO2 in four months of last year. And that was just the flights between the countries, not taking into account the truckloads of equipment needed, the power to stage such a show and the transport of all the thousands of fans getting to the gigs.

The Red Hot Chili Peppers produced 220 tonnes of CO2 with their private jet alone over six months on their last world tour which was 42 dates.

"The average a British person produces is 10 tonnes a year," said John Buckley, managing director-of CarbonFootprint.com.

He added: "It's great for the celebrities to come out and support the cause, but they then have to follow it up in their own lifestyles. We should now keep a close eye on whether Madonna and the others makes any changes to their own lifestyle."

Don't hold your breath!

We're okay for another day.....phew!

Rainbow at sunset

Whilst walking on the beach at dusk I witnessed a spectacular rainbow to the southeast and a stunning sunset to the southwest. Luckily I had camera in hand.........

Frank Llloyd Wright in Florida

Frank Lloyd Wright (1867 - 1959)

Connie and I recently visited the campus of Florida Southern College in Lakeland to make an architectural pilgrimage to the largest concentration of Frank Lloyd Wright buildings in the world. Known as the "Child of the Sun" collection, these buildings were designed by Wright for "the cultural value of organic buildings well suited to time, purpose and place."

Annie Pfeiffer Chapel (1939 - 1941)

He was commissioned by this small Methodist college in 1938 to design "a great education temple in Florida". The actual construction took place between 1941-1958 with twelve structures being completed and six left on the drawing board. Many of the buildings have been altered over the years and others have required extensive repairs and rehabilitation. His architectural vision apparently did not match the building materials of his time, while the merciless central Florida climate has not been an ally in preservation either. Several of the structures were being worked on while we were visiting as part of a multi-million dollar project to restore Wright's unique vision of organic architecture, which is one where the structures do not dominate the land but work in harmony with it.

If you ever find yourself in this neck of the woods I highly recommend that you check out this wonderful collection of offbeat and eclectic structures. There is an easy to use self-guided walking tour pamphlet available at the visitor center. Admission is free, which is always a bonus with me.

Covered walkways known as the Esplanades which total 1.5 miles in length. (1941 - 1958)

Hallway in the Polk County Science Building (1958)

Interior of the William H. Danforth Chapel (1955)

Stairway in the Science Building

The Esplanades with students walking underneath (1961).

Two years and counting

The second anniversary of this blog site is upon me and I wanted to say that it has been a most interesting ride so far. I thoroughly enjoy the means that it provides for sharing interesting things like news, views and travel as well as using it as a device with which to direct my readers to other places in cyberspace.

The most important work that I've tried to accomplish with this blog was to help get the word out about the renewal of bomb testing in Nevada, which some folks have claimed helped to get the whole protest movement rolling in southern Utah (although I'm clueless as to the veracity of that sentiment).

The most enjoyable aspects for me personally have been sharing my travels (and the gorgeous sunsets of Utah and Florida), as well as being able to write music reviews of albums and live shows and, of course, very serious game day analysis of the Georgia Bulldogs. It's like being the editor of my very own magazine without ever having to leave the confines of this comfortable office by the sea, in beautiful sunny Florida.

I thought I'd reprint the origin of the name of the blog, from my very first post, for all of you newer readers out there in cyberspace. Thanks for being there everyone, your feedback and heartfelt commentary has meant a lot to me over the years. I think of y'all every time I sit down to write a new post.

The title of the blog is a line from an old Dylan song I loved as a kid:

Buckets of rain
Buckets of tears
Got all these buckets comin' out of my ears.

I like buckets.